Today I bought another fitness tracker, just over three months after the last one I lost. (At that point, I swore I’d never go for another Fitbit again, aggravated by flimsy clasps and units that couldn’t cope with sweat or being inserted into their charger.) I bought the Fitbit Charge HR partly because there wasn’t much else in the shops at the moment, and also because it has reputedly the best (of a bad bunch) of resting heart rate tracking in its segment.
Also, La Serpiente told me to, although that was more than she wanted me to buy something blue instead of black.
I can’t trust La Serpiente’s opinions on fitness trackers. For a start, she decided on the Fitbit in between mouthfuls of a brochure for a TomTom GPS (termite-like, my daughter has an insatiable appetite for paper, especially information pamphlets of any kind). Secondly, she lacks experience in the fields of performance optimisation and health measurement. And she’s less than three years old.
Not that I show much better judgment: I write this after an evening spent drinking gin and eating cheese, and this morning I was the genius who gave his daughter a sugary doughnut to eat and then couldn’t understand why she was sprinting laps of the Esprit store in the mall while I vainly tried to slow her down.
Fitbit do have a history of this particular band giving people nasty rashes, but that’s if you leave it to get damp and wear it all the time. Basically, that’s the standard use case for Singapore, so that’s not so great.
On the plus side, I really enjoy checking my heart rate whenever I want to, and it has a silent alarm so (when I trust it) I’ll be able to use it to wake up early and not wake everyone else up. And it’s blue, which matches my eyes.
And since it’s late, it’s time I started using it to track my sleep. I’ll let you know how I get on.